The iwantmyname newsletter

Timo Reitnauer April 10, 2013

Manu and Lenz from iwantmyname are just back from a head-spinning ten days in the tropical heat of Cambodia, participating in the Good For Nothing Challenge (GFN). Here’s a quick overview from Lenz about how the visit unfolded and what was achieved:

The mission was to support NGO and other social initiatives as the South-East Asian nation grapples with poverty and the need to improve literacy and numeracy amongst its young people. The trip certainly gave us a crash course on the current situation in the country. We learned about the various approaches being taken to
help improve the situation and the work that is done by both large NGOs and grassroots charities, of which there are over 3000. It soon became apparent that all NGOs are not equal and contributors need to be judicious about where they expend their time and resources.

However, the idea behind GFN was to go to a country that faces massive challenges
and work with local NGOs and charities to make a change by applying our knowledge across the various fields of our expertise. During our lunch breaks we enjoyed local
speakers that told us about their experience in the aid sector and shared about their
lives in Cambodia, which really made a big difference in understanding
the environment we worked in.

Our first day saw us visiting a school next to an old rubbish dump in
one of the poorest slums in Phnom Penh. Grit, the project Manu and I worked on,
maintains a lab there. We gave out Android based tablets for school kids to use
in their time off to teach them maths. This lab gave us a good
way of testing progress, testing various interaction models and, most
important, working with the local teachers to increase the impact we can
have by helping them teach kids in a fun and easy way.

The Grit lab is in a house that has no air conditioning, just one window and a
few fans. When the power goes out, which happens quite regularly, there
is no way at all of cooling down the room, which makes for quite a challenging
environment when the thermometer is nudging 40 degrees. I managed to
observe the kids in there for about an hour and after that my attention
rapidly faded. Picturing myself learning in there every day gave me a
very high incentive to focus my efforts for the remainder of the week. Our biggest challenge with the technology was overheating tablets. The games are not the issue, the CPUs are idling, it is dust and heat that
kills them!

Developing an Android-based learning environment for tablets

With this in mind I started coding a working learning environment for
Grit that implemented the interaction designs we came up with after
watching the kids learn on the tablets. Manu worked on a curriculum and
on selecting content for the kids to play with that aligned with what they
were learning in class. Manu also made lots of progress on her Khmer language skills
because a lot of the maths they learn in the early years is in Khmer.

Because we lacked Khmer content for the tablets we instead worked closely with
the team that developed an Android learning course to foster a local
developer scene. It is hoped that this will give schools a way to teach Android development.
This team worked with KAPE and their schools to create a first
learning game in Khmer during the week. They also translated the entire
learning materials into Khmer which was so successful they have now been asked by universities if
they would be able to use the content as well to teach older students.

We ended up with a working learning app that runs on Android tablets and
can expose any Android based game that is relevant for the age of the
kids playing. We also implemented quizzes that are in sync with the
curriculum and help us track progress as well as give feedback to the
teachers. Because helping kids is our main objective, we are developing
all the software via open source and everyone who wants to contribute can do
so on github. We plan to organise a few hack sessions in Wellington over
the next months and are looking forward to meeting many of you who want to
help out and hack on something meaningful locally.

Cambodia is an incredibly diverse country. But their are huge inequities in wealth distribution, especially in
the capital Phnom Penh. It also has one of the highest density of
charities worldwide; which is a big issue because just giving money to
someone may only finance a brand new Range Rover — and there are loads
of them everywhere. Being in Cambodia and doing due diligence who we
give money to and who we help by cutting some code, made me confident our
time here was well spent. It was also incredibly well organised and the
time we needed to hit the ground running was hours not days or weeks.
Working in Cambodia is very challenging but also very rewarding and I am
sure Cambodia will see us again.

In terms of the future of GFN, we are already talking about the next
event. No location and time yet but if you are interested in joining us,
please get in touch — it will be a week well spent.

GFN Cambodia was an amazing experience for both of us and permanently
changed the way we think about aid work and about education. We are
stoked that we built a global tech company that in turn enables us to make a dent in the
international aid work with very targeted and well researched actions which genuinely target those most in need.